Nevada's At-Risk Funding Isn't Lifting the Students It Targets, a New WestEd Study Finds

LAS VEGAS — MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2026 — Nevada has gone further than any state in America to find its most vulnerable students: it built an algorithm. A new WestEd study says the algorithm finds the right kids — but the at-risk funding it steers their way isn't yet producing the results lawmakers hoped for.

The report, Understanding the At-Risk Indicator: Nevada's Pupil-Centered Funding Plan, was published by the research nonprofit WestEd in 2025 and runs 46 pages. It is the deepest independent look yet at a funding mechanism that is unique in the country: Nevada is the first state to use a machine-learning–based indicator to decide which students count as "at risk" of not graduating — and therefore which schools get extra dollars under the state's pupil-centered funding plan.

The study's bottom line is nuanced. The indicator works as a sorting tool. It struggles as a lever for results.

An algorithm no other state uses

At the center of the story is the GRAD score — Graduation Related Analytic Data. Every student in a Nevada public school gets one, calculated inside the Infinite Campus system from roughly 70 data points covering academic performance, attendance, behavior and economic stability. Students in the lowest fifth of those scores are flagged as at risk, and that flag carries funding with it.

The idea behind it is straightforward: instead of funding at-risk students based on blunt categories like poverty or zip code, Nevada tries to predict which individual students are most likely not to finish high school on time, then weights funding toward their schools. No other state allocates K-12 money this way, according to WestEd's product page for the report.

And on that narrow question — does the flag land on the right kids? — the answer is yes. WestEd found the GRAD indicator aligns closely with traditional measures of need: students with IEPs, English learners and foster youth are disproportionately flagged, and the score does a better job of targeting than the older categories did.

The money nearly tripled

The funding behind the flag has grown fast. In a presentation to the state Commission on School Funding, WestEd and the research group APA reported that at-risk funding rose from about $60 million to nearly $200 million in the years under review, while English learner funding also rose substantially. Overall, total revenues for Nevada's local education agencies climbed from $5.5 billion in fiscal 2019 to nearly $9 billion in fiscal 2024.

That growth rides on the pupil-centered funding plan — the formula the Legislature created with Senate Bill 543 in 2019 and put into effect in fiscal 2022, replacing the old Nevada Plan. The formula starts with a base per-pupil amount that has risen from $6,980 in fiscal 2022 to $7,431 in fiscal 2023 to roughly $9,414 in fiscal 2025, then adds weights for student needs: 0.45 for English learners, about 0.24 for at-risk students and 0.12 for gifted and talented students. A student who qualifies for more than one category generates only the highest single weight.

The part that isn't working

Here is where the study gets uncomfortable. WestEd found that schools and districts responded to the money with school-wide interventions — and those interventions did move math and English outcomes upward overall. But for the at-risk students themselves, the gains were more modest. The funding is reaching the right population; it just isn't translating into the academic lift that population needs.

The researchers also flagged a practical headache: GRAD scores change from year to year, which means the pool of flagged students — and the dollars attached to them — shifts annually. That complicates budget planning for schools and districts trying to build multi-year programs around the money.

WestEd's conclusion is not that the indicator is broken, but that the work is half done. The study calls for continued evaluation of how targeted funding actually translates into student achievement — in other words, Nevada figured out how to find these students before it figured out how to help them.

A graduation-rate footnote

One statistic in the Commission on School Funding materials looks dramatic on its face: the graduation rate for the at-risk cohort rose from 24% to 63% across the cohorts compared. But WestEd researcher Sean Tanner cautioned against reading that as a victory lap — the pool of students counted in the at-risk group more than doubled over that stretch, so the two numbers describe different populations.

"This is not tracking a cohort of kids and their performance over time," Tanner said in the presentation, describing the figures as year-to-year snapshots rather than longitudinal tracking of the same students.

The Class of 2025 did better — statewide

The broader graduation picture, meanwhile, is genuinely improving. The Nevada Department of Education reported in November 2025 that the statewide graduation rate for the Class of 2025 reached 85.4%, up from 81.6% for the Class of 2024 — with 34,175 students earning diplomas. Career and technical education completers graduated at a 98.8% rate, and the share of graduates earning a college- and career-ready diploma rose from 21.4% to 24.3%.

Twelve of Nevada's 17 school districts finished above the state average, and nine improved year over year, including the state's two largest: Clark County, where Superintendent Jhone Ebert reported an 86.6% rate — up from 81.5% — and Washoe County, which came in around 83.3%, up from 81.9%.

What comes next

The at-risk definition itself is now under review. A State Board of Education work group is examining how "at-risk" is defined and funded, with a WestEd analysis expected to inform the Commission on School Funding's deliberations. Separately, Senate Bill 460 — passed by the 2025 Legislature — tightens accountability around the funding formula and created a new Nevada District Performance Framework, with Class of 2026 graduation rates due this November.

The open question the study leaves behind is the one that matters most to the kids in the lowest fifth: Nevada built the smartest targeting system in the country. Now it has to prove it can teach to it. Catch up on the rest of today's Las Vegas headlines in our daily roundup.